Meta

french film

This is Bruno Dumont’s bizarre homage to late 60s, early 70s drive-in cinema: road film-cum-horror film. It’s so unlike the bulk of Dumont’s oeuvre. Twentynine Palms is generally ignored, rarely considered or discussed even by his fans. When put beside his other work, it’s almost like a ‘forgotten film’.

We examined Claire Denis’ foray into the realm of horror with “Trouble Every Day”, her 2001 “horror film”. But, she’s not the only French filmmaker who’s recently interested in exploring these realms. I could go into the work of Gaspar Noe, for instance, but I’d say all his work is influenced by and steeped in American exploitation, genre and horror film? Recently, there seem to be a whole clique of French filmmakers who’re making films that utilize exploitation film elements. Instead, I’m more interested in these art-house filmmakers who rarely, or barely, tread in those waters. For instance, Claire Denis and the brilliant Bruno Dumont.

Generally, Dumont’s films deal with the sublime, the transcendent and the spiritual. They exist in a halfway house, somewhere between religious and philosophical. Some even deal with religion, specifically, as their subject matter. Dumont, an avowed atheist however, seems to be drawn to and fascinated by the spiritual experience. I wouldn’t say “Twentynine Palms” does not contain any interest in this realm, but it certainly hides it more than the rest. But, “Twentynine Palms” isn’t really one of his naturally spiritual films. Instead, it seems a meditation on America. Even perhaps, an ode to American exploitation films of the “psychedelic” period-road films and shock horror specifically.

This interesting diminutive film, always struck a deep chord with me. I find it to be Dumont’s strangest, most peculiar work in an otherwise consistent filmography. Most viewers, I think, didn’t know what to make of this thing? It’s clearly Dumont’s least popular work, even considered a ‘failure’ by many. In my opinion, however, it’s at least as good as his next film: “Flanders”. A film that always generated far more respect because its subject matter, the current mid-east conflict, will always generate more gravitas. Whereas a sexually graphic road film wrapped round a shock-horror core, tends to be looked upon with jaundiced eye by those in the “art-house community”. A snobby group, in case ya didn’t know (no surprise to exploitation fans, I’m sure?)? But for someone like myself, who’ll view any cinematic offering from any source, these ‘politics’ are just plain annoying. In fact, another ‘secret’ is that most exploitation/horror film fans are just as snobby. Many of them are probably scoffing right now, at this discussion of a ‘foreign/art-house film’ on a page for exploitation/horror films and think me ‘pretentious’, I’m sure?

“Twentynine Palms” begins like a standard road film. A couple drive through Southern California and finally into Twentynine Palms, California. The male lead is an American photographer scouting locations, the female half is the photographer’s French girlfriend who seems to be along for the ride as; part concubine and partially to keep him from getting lonely while he scouts his locations. I can’t help but think that this may have an autobiographical element to it? I can easily see the photographer representing Dumont himself and a girlfriend or wife as they look for locations, perhaps even while scouting for this very film? It has a strong feeling of coming from some place real and personal.

At this point the film too gets literally personal. The two main leads engage in rather graphic sexual activity across various exotic locals throughout Southern California. They engage sexually at their barren motel swimming pool, inside their cheap, tawdry motel room, out of doors, on rocky formations and atop desert mesas, in their SUV, hell, Just about every place they end up for an extended period of time. Their rutting seems to reflect a better way for them to communicate with each other, since their verbal communication seems highly problematic (he speaks a little French, she hardly speaks even a little English). Perhaps Dumont is representing sex as the one way these two can more freely and easily communicate with each other? At times, it even seems like their sexual act has distinct ‘personalities’ to it; loving and gentle, as they express love to each other. At other times, when arguing and fighting with each other, their sexuality expresses ‘hatred’ and ‘anger’. It seems Dumont is showing us the transformation from verbal to physical with scenes of sexual intercourse taking the place of their lack of verbal skills.

As the sex between the couple begins to disintigrate and decline, the film takes on a more paranoid, brutal and anxious tone. It’s here the film seems to remind one most of the 70s film, “Deliverence”. There seems to be a feeling of menace, coming from without. One can feel a palpable sense of dread, that there are ‘others’, out there and that they’re (more than likely) not benevolent. Just as it’s revealed in “Deliverance”, it’s also revealed here. In fact it is revealed in a strikingly similar way. I get the feeling that, much in the way many people in America were haunted and disturbed by what can happen in the most rural areas of the south in “Deliverance”; Bruno Dumont seems to feel the same about the United States in general? I may be wrong, perhaps he’s trying to express something else entirely, but the feeling I take away from the film is one of a certain fear of location.

The ending of the film works on one’s mind in a most shocking and transgressive way. The first act of violence blindsides us, just as the proceeding act of murderous brutality does. The first act of violence makes me sense the filmmaker gets the feeling America is chock a block with utterly warrantless, random acts of violence. While the second act of violence seems to be making a comment on the effects of the first. In reality nearly all violence is random and it’s rarely, if ever, well thought out. Violence is what happens when verbal communication breaks down. Which leads me to think the film may be about break downs in communication. First, between the couple, then by the world at large and finally between individuals. I don’t see the film as an indictment of America*. Instead, it seems to summarize the fear and paranoia inherent in open and wild landscapes and the violence that comes from the inability to articulate oneself.

*It should also be noted that Twentynine Palms, CA also happens to be the locale of a known Marine base…there may be something to that?

“Trouble Every Day”, Claire Denis’ film meditation on intimacy, jealousy, lust and male-female relations in modern France. Art-house meets exploitation film. I think Denis is making a statement here about lust and death, a gory horror film as metaphor for contemporary love and lust.

The film stars the always interesting, Vincent Gallo, as a doctor flying to France with his new wife for their honeymoon. But he’s hiding a secret. He’s sick.

Another couple, a black man and a white woman. Like Gallo and his wife, the man is a doctor, but here the wife is the one sick. Apparently her sickness is further progressed than Gallo’s. Because we watch as the wife lures a truck driver into picking her up (metaphorically and literally; much of this film is a collision between the literal and metaphoric) and whom she leaves half eaten, covered in blood and dead in the grass. Her husband, buries the body of the trucker and lovingly cleans his wife’s body of the blood and gore left over and administers a mysterious medication to her. They don’t seem like a couple of young lovers anymore. Instead they’re more like an elderly couple, one of whom is senile, while the other cares for and cleans up after the other. A metaphor perhaps for that variety of true love, even if your lover happens to be a cannibal.

Gallo’s character can’t seem to find relief. The mysterious medication he takes (which looks the same as the one the wife is given) doesn’t seem to be helping much.

The whole film is about the nature of unrestrained animal lust. Both the African doctor’s wife and Gallo’s doctor character seem plagued by an illness which makes them prone to wild, abandoned sexual urges to the point where the body and flesh of the one being seduced is literally eaten and consumed by the infected one.

Gallo is apparently aware of what he may do and seems able to prevent himself from being completely unrestrained, with his wife, sexually. We even see, in a very early scene, that his wife’s shoulder has a badly bruised bite mark imprinted on it. An example, perhaps, of him earlier nearly losing control. In one memorable scene, he leaves the bedroom before he consummates the sex act with his wife, only to ‘relieve himself’ in the bathroom, while his wife pounds the door, crying. Humorously, he ejaculates a geyser of, what looks like something that would emit from a tightly clenched bottle of Head and Shoulders, onto the porcelain of the bathroom sink, rather than seminal fluid. It’s really like some somber version of that scene in “There’s Something About Mary”. I have no idea what that detail is meant to demonstrate except, perhaps, that his bodily fluids are tainted and diseased.

The African doctor’s wife, appears to be beyond the point of being able to restrain herself. It seems her disease has progressed to a point where she no longer has the ability to “withdraw” from the act? It’s probably why her husband is forced to board her up in their bedroom, nailing two by fours, planks of wood and boards like the protagonists in a zombie movie. Except In this ‘horror movie’ it’s the zombie thats boarded up, to protect us from it.

Gallo’s story concludes with a grotesquely violent sex act that resembles something between menstrual cunnilingus and some awful genital mutilation. The African doctor’s wife’s story finishes with her engaged in furious sexual congress with a youth, who seemed to be trying to save her from her ‘imprisonment’, only to wind up as her sushi meal for the night. Ultimately she winds up in a total conflagration, perhaps the only true ‘cure’ to the awful disease of the movie?

Finally, Gallo’s character, while showering the blood from his last ‘meal’ off of his body, tells his wife ” I want to go home”. We’re left to assume that he and his young wife will end up much like the African doctor and his wife. Completing the story’s cycle. But there are no absolute answers here, only concepts to ponder.

Denis’ use of horror cinema tropes to explore human sexuality, I found both highly original and far more compelling than a straight version of the same. Denis is also a master of using film to convey tactile senses, to explore and demonstrate that sense which is the hardest to convey in cinema. In this film, she really conveys the sensation of skin on skin, flesh on flesh, hands touching skin, fingers probing and exploring the dark moist areas of the human body. Her use of highly heightened sound is also remarkable, as it completes a complete demonstration of the senses.

This film is just as unnerving and disturbing (if not more so) than most straight horror films I’ve seen lately. Conversely, I also think it’s able to explore particular aspects of human sexuality far better, using a horror film template, than a straight melodrama ever could.